The Platypus Affiliated Society – The Platypus Review

Rousseau, Kant and Hegel

Introduction Bourgeois society came into full recognition with Rousseau, who in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and On the Social Contract, opened its radical critique. Hegel wrote: “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau.” Marx quoted Rousseau favorably that “Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature…

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Adam Smith, Revolutionary

Spencer A. Leonard

Unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau or even Friedrich Nietzsche, Adam Smith is a thinker few on the contemporary Left will have much time for. This tells us more about the impoverishment of the currently prevailing intellectual environment than about the persistent, if ever more obscure, influence of bourgeois radicalism on the Left.

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Nietzsche’s untimeliness

Sunit Singh

Nietzsche believed that gaining even a modicum of reason and freedom had to be a hard won, blood-soaked, and world-historical affair, but was nevertheless inclined to be as uncharitable in the extreme toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “the seducer” behind the idealist and rabble in the French Revolution, as toward the socialists who claimed to be the inheritors of the Jacobin tradition

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Teach-in Series: Capital in History

At the beginning of every academic semester, all campus-based chapters of the Platypus Affiliated Society internationally holds a teach-in entitled "Capital in History: Does Marxism Matter?" concerning the development of human history from a Marxist perspective, in order to serve as an introduction to Platypus and its activity. Stay tuned to your local chapters for details!

Description:
In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels famously observed in the Communist Manifesto that a specter was haunting Europe: the specter of Communism. 160 years later, it is Marxism itself that haunts us.

In the 21st century, it seems that the Left abandoned Marxism as a path to freedom. But Marx critically intervened in his own moment and emboldened leftists to challenge society; is the Left not tasked with this today? Has the Left resolved the problems posed by Marx, and thus moved on?

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A new assessment of an old trend: Trotskyism as the flip side of Stalinism

Joseph Green

A detailed study of Trotskyist theory is a large topic, which I and others have dealt with in a number of articles in the anti-revisionist journal, Communist Voice. We have developed over the years a critique of Trotskyism that not only differs from the old Stalinist critique, but shows that Trotskyism is in large part the flip side of Stalinism.

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